Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-project (253 mails)

Re: [opensuse-project] From today's openSUSE board meeting: Who can vote for the openSUSE board?

From:
Cornelius Schumacher <cschum@xxxxxxx>

Date:
Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:42:15 +0100

Message-id:
<200803172342.15683.cschum@xxxxxxx>

On Monday 17 March 2008 22:28:08 Andreas Jaeger wrote:

* Who can vote?

The idea here is to have the openSUSE community vote for the
openSUSE board. The members are the smallest part of the
community that has been appointed by the board, a member is
somebody with a continued and substantial contribution to
openSUSE. Having just members excludes some parts of the
community. On the other hand, it makes fraud easier if everybody
is allowed to vote - including people that have nothing to do with
openSUSE and just show up to vote for their "friend".

I think every community member should have the right to vote.

The board's main task is to facilitate communication. It certainly helps to
have a broad backing by the community to actually do this. It also gives the
board a strong legitimation, e.g. when representing the interests of the
community to Novell.

So I would suggest to let everybody vote who has registered in the openSUSE
user directory and has signed the Guiding Principles. That's a very inclusive
way to define who has the right to vote, so it's likely to cover a big
fraction of the community. We could also add an additional step and require
people to register as a voter, but in general I think the simpler the system
is the better.

To prevent fraud I think it's enough to forbid a person to register twice as a
voter or to give access to the account to other persons in the terms of
service. Of course technically it's possible to do that, but if somebody is
trying to affect results of a vote this has to be done in such a massive way,
that it's probably not too hard to detect that and to deactivate fraudulent
accounts. I also don't think it's very likely that somebody tries to affect
elections this way, as without the backing by the community being in the
board isn't associated with any particular power or benefit.